Summary: Multicomponent social signals are analysed separately in the two brain hemispheres in lizards wherein laterality is observed in response to social colour stimuli but not in response to motion stimuli.

Highlighted Article: Data from this paper indicate that there may be a ‘soft’ limit dependent on female ‘choice’ on energy allocation to their litters, rather than a ‘hard’, unbreachable limit defined by aspects of maternal physiology as is commonly assumed.

Highlighted Article: Alarm and aggregation pheromones modulate the subjective evaluation of aversive stimuli in an insect, thus contributing to behavioral plasticity beyond their stereotyped role as chemical messengers.

Summary: To compensate for acid–base disturbances, teleost fish activate acid- and/or base-transporting mechanisms at the gill. In trout, the abundance of ionocyte types, as well as the proportion of ionocytes that expresses carbonic anhydrase are altered to respond to acid–base disturbances.

Summary: Investigation of auditory attention networks in the Emei music frog (Babina daunchina) supports the idea that the frog brain allocates neural attention resources to attractive sounds and that such processing is sexually dimorphic.

Summary:Podarcis muralis are able to discriminate hue differences matching their own ventral colour variation; this has implications for unravelling the evolution and adaptive significance of colour polymorphisms.

Summary: In insect cold tolerance, cold impairs rectal reabsorption whereas cold acclimation enhances water but not potassium reabsorption, highlighting the role of the hindgut in the preservation of extracellular homeostasis.

Summary: A soft robotic exosuit designed to assist the paretic limb during walking can induce more symmetrical body center of mass power generation by the paretic and non-paretic limbs and reduce metabolic power consumption during hemiparetic walking.

Summary: The distal ileac plexus of larval lepidopterans recycles ions using gap junctions, and switches between ion secretion and reabsorption in response to input from the upstream components of the tubule.

Summary: The loss of iron-centered oxygen-binding proteins in Antarctic fishes does not correspond with an overall reduction in levels of oxidized macromolecules, antioxidants or rates of protein degradation.

Cuckoo spit turns up on plants every spring. Find out how the tiny insect nymphs that produce it breathe in their homemade aquatic environment in this article by Kephra Beckett, Anne Robertson and Philip Matthews.

A great white shark with a detachable tag attached to its dorsal fin. Photo credit: Andrew Fox.

Great white sharks have warm muscles and could swim really fast but they do not, preferring instead to swim slowly when cruising to catch seals. Yuuki Watanabe and colleagues explain more in their research article.

“…one day I found a vertebral column on my desk with a note that said ‘Dissect me’”

Marianne Porter is an Assistant Professor at Florida Atlantic University, USA, where she studies biomechanics, functional morphology, and bioinspired robotics. She tells us about her background and education, about teaching and mentoring, parental leave and swimming with sharks.

The Company of Biologists provide grants to fund scientific meetings, workshops and conferences in the fields covered by our journals. Typically, meetings with fewer than 100 people may be granted up to £2,000, increasing up to £6,000 for about 400 people. The next deadline to apply is 25 March 2019.

In preLights, Carola Yovanovich highlights a preprint by Sean Youn, Corey Okinaka and Lydia Mäthger that shows little skates can disguise their eyes by adjusting the degree of constriction of their pupils in response to the graininess of the substrate. It’s now a Research Article in JEB.